24th September 2002 Archive

Handspring told us that it had no public comment to make on the Research in Motion's patent infringement lawsuit. But you have plenty to say about this claim, based on a patent for a very small keyboard on a wireless device.

AMD has launched two top-of-the range mobile processors, the Athlon XP 2000+ and the 1900+. It's exhausting these days to find the actual clock speeds of AMD CPUs (AMD publishes them and promptly buries them deep on the web site). But suffice it to say both processors run less fast than 2GHz and 1.9GHz respectively.

The Parking Clowns Web site - which ridicules the parking policies of Canterbury City Council and its "over zealous [traffic] wardens" - has been suspended following allegations of police intimidation.

A company spokesperson explained to ElectricNews.Net that most of the company's 3,200 employees will be asked to take leave between 20 December and 6 January, as the firm prepares for sluggish sales following Christmas. The spokesperson explained that employees who have no annual leave remaining for 2002 will be asked to take an unpaid break or dip into their holiday days for next year.

Cyberterrorism hyping has reached new heights - according to a report in the Melbourne Herald Sun, at least. The Herald quotes expert Matthew Devost, speaking at a meeting at the US consulate there recently, as claiming the CIA believes at least 100 countries are investigating waging war by computer, or cyberterror.

Microsoft has made some modifications to the internal design of Xbox in the name of security, the most immediate upshot being apparently that existing mod chips won't work with the new design. According to a posting last week on the Xboxhacker BBS (reproduced here, the first of the new designs have been spotted in Australia.

Microsoft today announced that Peter Gabriel's new album Up would be the first ever in 5.1 surround sound to be made available via digital download. We at The Register are unable to confirm the truth of this, as religious convictions prohibit us from possessing all of the bits necessary to get the thing, but for the sake of argument we'll take it as read, and it seems to represent another front in Redmond's campaign to position itself, Windows Media Player and its file formats as 'must haves' for the music industry.